Lygos According to a brief remark in
Pliny the Elder's
Natural History, Byzantium was first known as
Lygos. The origin and meaning of the name are unknown. It may have been the name of a Thracian settlement situated on the site of the later city near the point of the peninsula (
Sarayburnu). Simon Zsolt has suggested it was etymologically related to the Greek name for the
Ligures and derived from the Anatolian
ethnonym Ligyes, a tribe that appears to have been neighbors to the
Paphlagonians.
Byzantium Byzantion (, ) was founded by Greek colonists from
Megara in 667 BC. The name is believed to be of Thracian or Illyrian origin and thus to predate the Greek settlement. In the
Middle Ages,
Byzántion was also a
synecdoche for the
eastern Roman Empire. (An
ellipsis of ). The name
Byzantius and
Byzantinus were applied from the 9th century to gold
Byzantine coinage, reflected in the French
besant (''d'or
), Italian bisante
, and English besant
, byzant
, or bezant''. Later, the name
Byzantium became common in the West to refer to the
Eastern Roman Empire, whose capital was Constantinople. As a term for the east Roman state as a whole,
Byzantium was introduced by the historian
Hieronymus Wolf only in 1555, a century after the empire, whose inhabitants called it the Roman Empire (), had ceased to exist.
Augusta Antonina The city was called
Augusta Antonina () for a brief period in the 3rd century AD. The Roman Emperor
Septimius Severus (193–211) conferred the name in honor of his son Antoninus, the later Emperor
Caracalla.
New Rome Before the Roman emperor
Constantine the Great made the city the new eastern capital of the
Roman Empire on May 11, 330, he undertook a major construction project, essentially rebuilding the city on a monumental scale, partly modeled after Rome. Names of this period included "the New, second Rome",
Alma Roma , , "Eastern Rome",
Roma Constantinopolitana. The Third Canon of the First Council of Constantinople (381) refers to the city as New Rome. The term "New Rome" lent itself to East-West polemics, especially in the context of the
Great Schism, when it was used by Greek writers to stress the rivalry with (the original) Rome.
New Rome is also still part of the official title of the
Patriarch of Constantinople.
Constantinople Kōnstantinoúpolis (Κωνσταντινούπολις),
Constantinopolis in Latin and
Constantinople in English, was the name by which the city became more widely known, in honor of
Constantine the Great who established it as his capital. It is first attested in official use under Emperor
Theodosius II (408–450). and Kostantinoupolis (Κωσταντινούπολις). Constantinopolis remained the principal official name of the city throughout the Byzantine period, and the most common name used for it in the West until the early 20th century. This name was also used (including its Kostantiniyye variant) by the
Ottoman Empire to describe the entire urban area of the city until the advent of the
Republic of Turkey—the core Walled City was always Istambul for the Ottomans. According to Eldem Edhem, who wrote an encyclopedia entry on Istanbul for
Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, "many" Turkish members of the public as well as Turkish historians often perceive the use of Constantinople for the Ottoman city, despite being historically accurate, as being "
politically incorrect".
Other Byzantine names Besides
Constantinople, the Byzantines referred to the city with a large range of honorary appellations, such as the "Queen of Cities" (), also as an adjective, Βασιλεύουσα, the 'Reigning City'. In popular speech, the most common way of referring to it came to be simply
the City (Greek:
hē Polis /iˈpo.lis/, ,
Modern Greek:
i Poli, η Πόλη
/i ˈpoli/ ). This usage, still current today in colloquial Greek and Armenian (Պոլիս, pronounced "Polis" or "Bolis" in the
Western Armenian dialect prevalent in the city), also became the source of the later Turkish name,
Istanbul (see below). book
Kitab-ı Bahriye refers to the city as Kostantiniyye (
Walters Art Museum collection).
Kostantiniyye Kostantiniyye (
Arabic: ,
translit. al-Qusṭanṭīniyya,
Persian: ,
translit. Qosṭanṭanīye, Ottoman Turkish: ,
translit. Ḳosṭanṭīnīye) is the name by which the city came to be known in the
Islamic world. It is an Arabic
calque of
Constantinople. After the
Ottoman conquest of 1453, it was used as the most formal official name in Ottoman Turkish, and remained in use throughout most of the time up to the fall of the Empire in 1922. However, during some periods Ottoman authorities favoured other names (see below).
Istanbul The modern Turkish name
İstanbul () () is attested (in a range of variants) since the 10th century, at first in
Armenian and
Arabic (without the initial
İ-) and then in Ottoman sources. Some sources have speculated that it comes from the
Medieval Greek phrase "", meaning "to the city",
reinterpreted as a single word, but a 2015 review of the literature found a more likely explanation to be that: "The form of the etymon is the colloquial Middle Greek phrase , not the puristic literary ancestor of this. The meaning of the etymon is probably ‘in Constantinople’, possibly ‘to Constantinople’ and just possibly ‘into Constantinople’". The incorporation of parts of articles and other particles into Greek place names was common even before the Ottoman period: Navarino for earlier Avarino, Satines for Athines,
etc. Similar examples of modern Turkish place names derived from Greek in this fashion are
İzmit, earlier
İznikmit, from Greek
Nicomedia,
İznik from Greek
Nicaea ([iz nikea]),
Samsun (''s'Amison
from "se" and "Amisos"), and İstanköy
for the Greek island Kos (from is tin Ko
). The occurrence of the initial i-'' in these names, including Istanbul's, is largely secondary
epenthesis to break up syllabic consonant clusters, prohibited by the
phonotactic structure of
Turkish, as seen in Turkish
istasyon from French
station or
ızgara from the Greek
schára. In 19th century Turkish book-printing it was also used in the impressum of books, in contrast to the foreign use of
Constantinople. At the same time, however,
İstanbul too was part of the official language, for instance in the titles of the highest Ottoman military commander
(İstanbul ağası) and the highest civil magistrate
(İstanbul efendisi) of the city, and the Ottoman Turkish version of the
Ottoman constitution of 1876 states that "The capital city of the Ottoman State is İstanbul".
İstanbul and several other variant forms of the same name were also widely used in Ottoman literature and poetry. T. R. Ybarra of
The New York Times wrote in 1929 that "'Istambul' (our usual form for the word is 'Stamboul') has always been the Turkish name for the whole of Constantinople".
The Observer wrote that "To the Turks themselves it never was Constantinople, but Istanbul." In 1929
Lloyd's agents were informed that telegrams now must be addressed to "Istanbul" or "Stamboul", but
The Times stated that mail could still be delivered to "Constantinople". However
The New York Times stated that year that mail to "Constantinople" may no longer be delivered. In 1929, Turkish government advocated for the use of Istanbul in English instead of Constantinople. The
U.S. State Department began using "Istanbul" in May 1930. In English, the name is usually written "Istanbul". In modern Turkish, the name is written "İstanbul" (
dotted i/İ and
dotless ı/I being two distinct letters in the
Turkish alphabet).
Stamboul Stamboul or
Stambul is a variant form of
İstanbul. Like
Istanbul itself, forms without the initial
i- are attested from early on in the Middle Ages, first in Arabic sources of the 10th century and Armenian ones of the 12th. Some early sources also attest to an even shorter form
Bulin, based on the Greek word
Poli(n) alone without the preceding article. (This latter form lives on in modern Armenian.) The word-initial
i- arose in the Turkish name as an
epenthetic vowel to break up the
St- consonant cluster, prohibited in Turkish
phonotactics.
Stamboul was used in Western languages to refer to the central city, as
Istanbul did in Turkish, until the time it was replaced by the official new usage of the Turkish form in the 1930s for the entire city. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western European and American sources often used
Constantinople to refer to the metropolis as a whole, but
Stamboul to refer to the central parts located on the historic peninsula, i.e. Byzantine-era Constantinople inside the
walls. would be primary sources, while Agoston and Masters are secondary-->
Islambol , which was struck in his fifth regnal year (). The name
Islambol ( ) appeared after the Ottoman conquest of 1453 to express the city's new role as the capital of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. It was first attested shortly after the conquest, and its invention was ascribed by some contemporary writers to sultan
Mehmed II himself. The term
Kostantiniyye still appeared, however, into the 20th century.
Other Ottoman names Ottomans and foreign contemporaries, especially in diplomatic correspondence, referred to the Ottoman imperial government with particular honorifics. Among them are the following: •
Bāb-i ʿĀlī (, "The
Sublime Porte"); a
metonym referring to the gate of
Topkapı Palace or
Asitana •
Pāy-taḫt or sometimes
Pāyitaḫt (, "The Seat/
Base of the Throne") The "Gate of Felicity", the "Sublime Gate", and the "Sublime Porte" were literally places within the Ottoman sultans'
Topkapı Palace, and were used
metonymically to refer to the authorities located there, and hence for the central Ottoman imperial administration. Modern historians also refer to government by these terms, similar to the popular usage of
Whitehall in Britain. The Sublime Gate is not inside Topkapı palace; the administration building whose gate is named Bâb-ı Âlî is between Agia Sofia and Beyazit mosque, a huge building. ==Historical names in other languages==